Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander

Image of the world's most interesting man with the caption 'I don't always read, but when I do, I read the directions'

Figure 31: The MemeGenerator contributes a World's Most Interesting Man for the occasion

The results of this assignment are always fascinating. Some students relish it and create phenomenal memes, some of which have actually taken off. Others stay too close to the heart, or make theirs so specific that they realize upon completion that they’ve set too severe of a gatekeeper.

But a second thing happens, something I am not sure my students realize but which I have been able to document through writer’s memos, class activities, and emails: creating a meme, and needing to understand the rules, results in students reading later course assignments more carefully, more fully understanding the rules, and more carefully engaging in the process of completing the assignments based on the prompt. I know in an ideal educational setting this should be expected of all assignments, but I am confident I am not alone in having students who sometimes read the assignment sheet too quickly or tune out during the explanation of a key point, much like the way so few of us read the directions that come in a box with a new purchase. Over the course of the last two years, using this assignment with seven different classes, I have seen at least half of the students who made mistakes based on reading the assignment incorrectly or not engaging the requirements (which I refer to with my students as the “rules of the game”) completely course correct from C level work to A level work.

Reading and making memes isn’t new for students; it shouldn’t be new for anyone. From learning to eat to learning to tie our shoes, from learning to write letterforms to learning to write form letters, human beings have always been meme machines. It is this fact that I was depending upon with my playful landing page: puzzles are a known set of rules, so it’s a memetic action to know that the “start” button begins a task that must be completed to enter the text. I didn't need to explicitly tell you "this is a puzzle" or how to solve it because you recognized the pattern from having done the same task before.

Shining a light on the fact that we think in meme-like ways and meme-thinking can make tasks easier to understand empowers a meme machine to understand its motives, to move from victim of the virus to wielder of the vaccination. In other words we can use the concept of the meme, the same concept that makes us chuckle at Futurama Frye, to give students the confidence to feel they can master any composing task. Because in the end even the most complex task is somehow like what has been done before, and the learning I hope to inspire in my students isn’t ever how we recreate the wheel. No, I want students who figure out how to make the wheel just a tiny bit more efficient while exhibiting have complete mastery over the wheel. .